Robert Logan
Chapter 4 McLuhan and Causality: Technological Determinism,
Formal Cause and EmergenceThere is absolutely no inevitability as
long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening -
McLuhan
Introduction
One of the most controversial aspects of Marshall McLuhans study
of media and their effects is the relationship of his approach to
causality and determinism. Despite his claims to the contrary he
has been accused of being a technological determinist. We have
already encountered his claim that he begin[s] with effects and
work[s] round to the causes (Molinaro, McLuhan, C., and Toye 1987,
478), which is quite the opposite of a deterministic approach.
Complicating matter even more he describes this approach of
reversing cause and effect as formal cause, the term that was first
formulated by Aristotle in Book V of Metaphysics as part of
Aristotles four causes (i.e. material, efficient, formal and final
cause). I will argue that the simplest way to understand McLuhans
position vis--vis causality and determinism is to recognize that
McLuhan was basically foreshadowing emergence theory if not in name
at least in spirit.
But what is emergence theory? An emergent system is a composite
system that has properties that cannot be derived from, reduced t
or predicted from the properties of the components of which it is
composed. A living organism is emergent because it has properties
that the individual chemicals of which it is made do not possess.
Even water in its liquid form has properties of surface tensions
and liquidity that its individual water molecules do not possess.
And a water molecule has properties not possessed by the two
hydrogen atoms and the one oxygen atom of which it is composed. A
society has properties not possessed by the individuals that make
it up. There are two ways in which the term emergence can be
interpreted that go by the names of strong and weak emergence. In
strong emergence the properties of a composite system cannot be
reduced to the properties of the components of which it is
composed. In weak emergence the properties of a composite system
can be reduced to the properties of the components of which it is
composed. The notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts, which dates back to Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, is
basically a form of weak emergence as these thinkers never discuss
the irreducibility of the properties of the composite system to
those of its components. Mill for example correctly states in 1859
in Of the Composition of Causes, The chemical combination of two
substances produces, as is well known, a third substance with
properties entirely different from those of either of the two
substances separately, or of both of them taken together. It is
well know, however, that the chemical properties of compounds can
be reduced to the properties of the atoms of which they are
composed by making use of quantum mechanics.
As for Aristotle his formulation in the Metaphysics of, the
totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is
something besides the parts, does not address the question of
reducibility. Aristotle also developed in his account of biology
something somewhat like emergence, namely, the notion of potencies
by which
the adult form of the human or animal emerges out of its
youthful form. (Unlike contemporary emergence theories, however, he
held that the complete form is already present in the organism from
the beginning, like a seed; it just needs to be transformed from
its potential state to its actual state.) Aristotles explanation of
emergence included formal causes, which operate through the form
internal to the organism, and final causes, which pull the organism
(so to speak) toward its final teleos or perfection (Clayton 2006,
5).
Aristotle's analysis of cause presumed that there was an agent,
the source of an efficient cause, with a purpose that was the final
cause using certain materials, the material cause to achieve that
final cause making use of an existing pattern or form that played
the role of formal cause. With emergent phenomena the pattern or
form is not known ahead of time, as one cannot predict beforehand
how the components of a complex system will self-organize
themselves. There is certainly no purpose in the way the components
self-organize themselves because the purpose of the system if it
has one only becomes apparent after it has emerged not before. It
is similar to the way that the pattern or form of the emergent
system is only known after the system emerges and hence cannot be
considered a cause but rather an effect. There is no final cause
for the same reason there is no efficient cause - what emerges is
not due to the purpose of some agent. One could argue that the
purpose of the emergent system is the emergent system itself but
this is to say that the purpose of the effect is the effect itself,
which is tautological. In short neither Aristotles biology nor his
four-cause analysis can account for strong emergence.
There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the
emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the
emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the
parts creating the whole) and vice-versa the composite system
exerts downward effects on its components, which form constraints
on the behavior of those components. The interactions of the
components that lead to the self-organization of the emergent
system are non-linear because of that upward and downward
causation. The lateral non-linear causation of the components of
the system among themselves actually creates the emergent system.
The emergent system then in turn acts downward on those components
of which it is composed.
Before the nature of emergence and complexity theory was
understood it was thought that complex non-linear systems were the
exception to the rule in nature. We now realize that complexity is
actually the norm rather than an aberration and that most forms of
causality are non-linear and without a purposeful agent. The four
causes of Aristotle provide a description in those rare cases where
there is an agent with a purpose, the requisite materials and a
plan or form. Back in the past when philosophers thought in terms
of a demiurge that created the world Aristotles four causes made
sense as a way to describe nature.
With the ecological approach we use to describe so much of
nature today Aristotles four causes are an anachronism. What
McLuhan who wanted to retain some of the traditional tools of the
classical period has done is to redefine formal cause along the
lines of the reversal of cause and effect and the reversal of
figure and ground. The ground in which Aristotle operated was
highly visual and literate in which only one thing at a time was
entertained. It is therefore not surprising that the twist that
McLuhan gave to Aristotle to bring him up to date would basically
entail emergence theory. McLuhans approach to cause and effect was
non-linear whereas that of Aristotles was linear as befits a visual
thinker.
Although McLuhan never discussed emergence explicitly I will
argue that his field approach, his reversal of cause and effect and
the non-linear interaction of figure and ground that are the
trademarks of the McLuhan approach are best understood as downward
and upward causation between an emergent system and the components
of which it is composed and as such hints at emergence. I am not
the first to suggest a connection between McLuhans approach and
emergence or systems thinking. Lance Strate (2010) also explores
this connection and documents earlier attempts in this direction
including my own earlier work when he wrote, Systems concepts and
approaches do appear in the media ecology literature over the past
two decades (see, for example, Logan, 2007; Rushkoff, 1994, 2006;
Strate, 2006; Zingrone, 2001).We will begin this study by first
dismissing the absurd claim that McLuhan was a technological
determinist. We then develop our thesis that McLuhan was in fact an
emergentist and a strong one at that. In order to nuance McLuhans
relation to emergence theory the distinction will be made between
strong emergence theory in which the properties of the emergent
system can not be derived from, predicted from or reduced to the
properties of the components of which it is made and weak emergence
theory, which states that while the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts, the properties of the whole are reducible to its
constituent parts. Weak emergence precedes McLuhans work and dates
back to Aristotle and John Stuart Mill.
We will show that McLuhan foreshadowed a basically strong
emergentist position, one that only emerged explicitly (pun
intended) after his passing in the 1980s. Earlier forms of
emergence in the modern era date back to George Henry Lewes (1875),
the scholar who first used the term emergence that was picked up by
a number of scholars particularly emergent evolutionists whose work
went into disfavor with the rise of the science of genetics in the
1920s and 1930s and the triumph of an analytical, experimental
approach to biology (Corning 2002). Emergence began to make a
comeback during the time McLuhan was beginning his research
according to Corning (2002):
A much broader reaffirmation of the importance of wholes in
nature occurred in the 1950s with the rise of general systems
theory. Inspired especially by the writings of biologist Ludwig von
Bertalanffy, the systems movement was to that era what complexity
theory is today.
In his book War and Peace in the Global Village (McLuhan, Fiore
and Angel 1968), McLuhan refers explicitly to the general systems
theory work of von Bertalanffy, which is a hint of McLuhans
interest in systems theory. We also know that McLuhan was familiar
with the work of Norbert Wiener.
It was only after McLuhan had completed his work that emergence
theory and complexity theory really took off. As Corning noted: The
re-emergence of emergence as a legitimate, mainstream concept
roughly coincided with the growth of scientific interest in the
phenomenon of complexity and the development of new, non-linear
mathematical tools particularly chaos theory and dynamical systems
theory which allowed scientists to model the interactions within
complex, dynamic systems in new and insightful ways. Most of these
developments occurred after the passing of McLuhan in 1980.Given
the timelines of the re-emergence of emergence theory and the
emergence of complexity and chaos theory McLuhans parallels with
strong emergence, complexity and chaos theory are a result of the
unique approach he took to his study of the effects of media. I
will draw upon many of McLuhans insights and show how they
independently parallel many of the aspects of strong emergence such
as his observation that the complexity due to any change in the
means of communication creates a situation in which predictions and
controls are not possible McLuhan (1955). I will show that McLuhans
identification of breakpoints in communications such as the
introduction of the alphabet or the printing press parallel the
phase transitions characteristic of emergent systems. I also
identify a link between McLuhans the medium is the message and
Brian Arthurs application of emergence theory to economics and in
particular Arthurs notion of increasing returns. I will show that a
mediums ability to create an environment of service and disservice
parallels niche construction in the Darwinian evolution in the
biosphere.
To conclude our study a comparison will be made of McLuhans
brand of formal cause as described by him and strong emergence
theory. I will argue that formal cause as used by McLuhan is in
fact closer to emergence theory than to Aristotles formulation of
formal cause. I will also argue that McLuhans brand of formal cause
is not restricted to just the understanding of human artifacts but
can be used to understand emergence within nature as well.
I find it paradoxical that McLuhan would hearken back to
Aristotle and his notion of formal cause because of the disconnect
between McLuhans thinking and that of Aristotle. For Aristotle a
proposition is either true or false. He was the first to formulate
the law of the excluded middle in his book On Interpretation that
states either a proposition is true or its negation is true but not
both. For McLuhan it is possible for a proposition to be half true,
which according to McLuhan is still a lot of truth (There is a lot
of truth in a half-truth). McLuhan was never tempted by the
academic ... virtue of carefully qualifying his statements... when
accused of purveying half truths, he often defended himself with
the remark, worthy of Lenin, that half a brick can break a window
quite as well as a whole brick (Marchand 1989, 189). McLuhan
embraced the thinking of quantum mechanics and that of Niels Bohr,
who once said, The opposite of a correct statement is a false
statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another
profound truth.
The following statements of McLuhan are also not in the spirit
of Aristotle for whom the truth and being correct were sacred
values. Not for McLuhan who said:
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
You don't like those ideas? I got others.
You mean my whole fallacys wrong?
I may be wrong, but Im never in doubt.Another disconnect between
McLuhan and Aristotle is the difference in their attitude to the
order in which a text should be developed. In his Poetics Aristotle
states, " " ("For a plot to be whole it must have a beginning,
middle and end"). McLuhans texts are famous for a lack of a
beginning, middle and end. The Gutenberg Galaxy is an arbitrary
collection of short articles that repeat certain ideas over and
over again. Understanding Media are a collection of articles
describing the effects of certain media without any particular
logic to the order in which the media are presented. Other McLuhan
books such as The Medium is the Massage, War and Peace in the
Global Village, The Book of Probes, From Clich to Archetype,
Culture is Our Business are a collection of observations with no
particular order to their development.
McLuhan was not a Technological Determinist He was an
Emergentist
One of the charges leveled at McLuhan in an attempt to
trivialize his work is that he was merely a technological
determinist. Given his reversal of cause and effect and his
arguments of their simultaneity it is absurd to consider McLuhan as
a technological determinist yet the charge has been leveled and it
is best to put it to rest.
Was he in fact a technological determinist? This is a difficult
question to answer because the term technological determinist is a
loaded term used by many scholars as a pejorative to dismiss the
work of others as being nave or simplistic. Despite the fact that
McLuhan did not operate from a point of view or a theoretical base
he was accused by many of being a technological determinist. P.
David Marshall (2004, 31) is just one of many communications
scholars who tried to tar McLuhan with the technological
determinist brush when he wrote: Because of the simple relationship
between technology and its capacity to transform society, McLuhan
is rightly labeled a technological determinist.
In fact, P. David Marshall is the one who is being simplistic in
suggesting that McLuhan proposed that there existed a simple
relationship between technology and its capacity to transform
society. If P. David Marshall had read the opening pages of The
Gutenberg Galaxy carefully he would have encountered the following
description McLuhan made of his project. Far from being
deterministic, however, the present study will, it is hoped,
elucidate a principal factor in social change which may lead to a
genuine increase in human autonomy. There you have it in McLuhans
own words he did not intend his study to be deterministic.
P. David Marshall (2004) made another phony charge in trying to
label McLuhan as technological determinist when he suggested that,
McLuhan places too much importance on one factor in shaping society
and hence overlooks political and economic forces. In fact the
opposite is true. McLuhan constantly examines the connections
between media and communications on the one hand and commerce and
the nature of work on the other hand. For example, McLuhan observed
that electric technology ended the dichotomy between work and
leisure. McLuhan and Nevitt (1972) co-authored the book Take Today:
The Executive as Dropout in which they analyzed the impact of media
and technology on economics and politics.
McLuhan biographer Coupland (2010, 187) argued that rather than
overlooking political and economic forces that McLuhan actually
presaged the profound changes that took place long after his
passing.
McLuhans writing was profoundly politicalthe changes he foretold
werent overnight phenomena. They were about changes in cognition,
cultural shifts that would cause shifts in the evolution of
humankindsuch events as the collapse of communism and the
[emergence of] jihad.
What is Determinism and Is It Such a Bad Thing Anyway
The charge of technological determinism cuts in two directions.
McLuhans critics used it in the pejorative sense to dismiss his
work, but there is the flip side to determinism. For example,
consider the fact that determinism is at the heart of much
explanatory science. Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein and Darwin
were all determinists. Any formulator of a scientific law is a
determinist. Even quantum mechanics, which gives up on causality at
the micro-atomic level, retains it for predicting the behaviour of
large ensembles of particles, which have led to our understanding
of sold state physics that makes todays digital technology
possible.
McLuhan developed a very rich relationship between technology
and media and their impact on society. Certainly McLuhan is guilty
as charged despite his explicit statement to the contrary, if one
wishes to label anyone who posits a mere relationship between
technology and societal transformation as a technological
determinist. Anyone one who would deny a relationship between
technology and societal transformation would be hopelessly nave and
out of touch with social realities. McLuhan while connecting social
change to technology did not suggest a simple linear connection
between the two. Rather he adopted an environmental and field
description of their relationship. Technology was an important
factor in understanding social change but clearly not the only one.
Having extracted the poison of the charge of technological
determinism, the question becomes to what extent was McLuhan a
technological determinist and what kind of technological
determinist was he.
There is no question that a central tenet of McLuhans approach
to understanding media is that they contribute in a very important
if not dominant way to social, political, cultural, educational and
economic transformations. McLuhans notions that the medium is the
message and media are living vortices of power are certainly two
cases in point. Yet having established McLuhan as a technological
determinist in the sense that technologys impact on societal
processes is important we are left with the question as to whether
or not he was a nave technological determinist as some have
claimed. Clearly McLuhan was not a single cause explainer of
anything. He railed against the notion of the point of view and the
single vision of Newton. If you had a point of view, that stayed
put (McLuhan, McLuhan, Staines 2003, 226). He described an insight
as the sudden awareness of a complex process, which is how he
regarded the relationship between media and society.
McLuhans Field Approach
McLuhan (1962, 7) describes his methodology with the opening
line of his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. He wrote, The Gutenberg
Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a
mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the
only practical means of revealing causal operations in history.
In Understanding Media McLuhan (1964) developed the notion of a
field associated with electric information, which he related to the
electric field. The field notion was a key concept and organizing
principle for McLuhan in his understanding of the post-Gutenberg
world, which he viewed as a total field of interacting events
(ibid., 248). A field approach implies an ecological approach. An
ecosystem can only be treated and described with a field approach.
There are too many elements in the media ecosystem like the
interactions of all forms of media and the humans that interact
with each other through them for it to be described as anything
other than a field. It is not possible to describe them one
component at a time. Newtonian mechanics could describe the solar
system one celestial body at a time but that approach broke down
for describing the interactions of electrical particles because of
the sheer number of them that approaches 10 to the power of 26 or
27 (1026 or 1027). It is also the case that the media environment
or mediasphere also consists of many different components, namely
the 8 billion humans that inhabit the planet and all of the
technological media through which they interact with each other and
their physical environment.
The electric age gave us the means of instant, total
field-awareness (ibid., 56).
Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend
to eliminate the fragmented specialties of form and function that
we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and
mechanization (ibid., 243).
Clearly McLuhan made use of a field approach, which de facto
rejects the notion of a linear cause and effect model that
characterizes nave technological determinism. Describing the
effects of electric media he wrote, We live today in the Age of
Information and Communication because electric media instantly and
constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all
men participate (McLuhan 1964, 248). McLuhan adopted a
total-field-theory approach, which I believe was influenced by his
understanding of modern 20th century science as the following
passage suggests,
All types of linear approaches to situations past, present, or
future are useless. Already in the sciences there is recognition of
the need for a unified field theory, which enable scientists to use
one continuous set of terms by way of relating the various
scientific universes (McLuhan 1953, 126).
The unified field theory approach that McLuhan advocates
retrieves Einsteins Theory of Relativity in which space and time
are united in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Using the
Laws of Media McLuhans field approach enhances media ecology,
obsolesces content analysis, retrieves Einsteins four dimensional
space-time continuum, and flips into the reversal of cause and
effect.
McLuhan, Emergence and Complexity Theory
Rather than regarding McLuhan as a technological determinist I
believe it is more accurate to consider him as an early
emergentist. McLuhan without explicitly making use of complexity
theory and emergence was basically applying that kind of thinking
to his analysis of communications and the impact of technology.
McLuhans recognition of the non-linear dynamic aspect of the
relationship between media and society in a certain sense
foreshadowed the notions of non-linear dynamics, co-evolution and
complexity or strong emergence theory and to a certain extent chaos
theory.
Communication theorists whose approach was that of content
analysis basically embraced stability. For them the arrival of a
new technology did not change the communication environment and the
meaning of a message was purely a function of its content totally
independent of the medium used to transmit the content. For them
the medium is not the message the content is. Whereas for McLuhan,
the entrance of a new technology changed the entire communication
environment by interacting with all of the earlier forms of
technology and the meaning of a communication was effected by the
medium through which it was communicated. He wrote, A new medium is
never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in
peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds
new shapes and positions for them (McLuhan, E. and Zingrone 1995,
278).
I am not suggesting that McLuhan played any role in the
development of emergence and complexity theory but rather that in
his non-mathematical approach to understanding media and their
effects he independently developed ideas that paralleled complexity
work in physics, biology and economics. There is a hint of
emergence or complexity theory in a 1955 paper of McLuhan (1955) in
which he wrote, It is therefore, a simple maxim of communication
study that any change in the means of communication will produce a
chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of culture and
politics. And because of the complexity of the components in this
process, predictions and controls are not possible.
I find this passage quite prescient because one of the basic
tenets of complexity theory is that complex non-linear systems have
properties not possessed by the components of which they are
composed and it is impossible to predict those properties in
advance. In terms of biological evolution this translates into the
notion that one cannot prestate Darwinian pre-adaptations
(Kauffman, Logan et. al. 2007). The reason that I find this
prescient is that as early as 1955 way before strong emergence and
complexity theory emerged (pun intended) McLuhan seems to be aware
of systems theory, which was just beginning to be formulated. It is
possible that McLuhan arrived at these ideas on his own as a result
of his field approach to understanding media.
Although McLuhan was aware of cybernetics and general systems
theory the formulation of emergence and complexity theory did not
take off until after his death in 1980 as described above. The
first meetings of the group that founded the Santa Fe Institute
took place in 1984 but McLuhan had already incorporated many of the
ideas that became part of this movement in his work dating back to
the 60s such as his focus on pattern recognition.
We are now living in a world where things change so rapidly that
anybody can spot the configuration, the pattern of change and were
living increasingly in a world of pattern recognition.
(http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/electric-age/1968-pattern-recognition.php)
McLuhans stress on pattern recognition is an integral part of
the approach of complexity theory. McLuhans emphasis on a field
approach rather than a linear sequential, one thing at a time,
mechanistic approach translates into an anti-reductionist stance,
which is at the heart of complexity theory with its focus on
non-linear dynamics. McLuhan was totally opposed to the point of
view or the reductionist single vision of Newton. He definitely
embraced the notion that the dynamics of media in the age of
electric communication is non-linear. He wrote with co-author
Nevitt,
Nils Bohrs complementarity that represents atomic interactions
as both acoustic waves and visual particles is exemplified by every
process involving the continuous interplay of simultaneous
actions.Such complementarity of figure-ground appears as a causal
relation in all pre-packaged processes. Complementarity is the
process whereby effects become causes. Today, as causes and effects
merge instantaneously, the new common ground is neither container
nor category, but the vastness of space via media (McLuhan and
Nevitt 1972).
The following description of complexity by Brian Arthur (2007)
who applied complexity theory to economics parallels many of the
approaches of McLuhan.
Complexity theory is really a movement of the sciences. Standard
sciences tend to see the world as mechanistic. That sort of science
puts things under a finer and finer microscope. In biology the
investigations go from classifying organisms to functions of
organisms, then organs themselves, then cells, and then organelles,
right down to protein and enzymes, metabolic pathways, and DNA.
This is finer and finer reductionist thinking. The movement that
started complexity looks in the other direction. Its asking, how do
things assemble themselves? How do patterns emerge from these
interacting elements? Complexity is looking at interacting elements
and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. Its
important to point out that the patterns may never be finished.
Theyre open-ended.
The interacting elements that McLuhan studied were media whose
interaction with each other are non-linear and open-ended. Each new
medium creates a new environment (McLuhan 1964, 158) and this
creation of new environments will continue as long as new media
emerge, a process that has proceeded uninterrupted since genus Homo
created their first tools. McLuhans media ecology approach is
essentially a systems thinking approach that incorporates the
notion that the interactions of the media among themselves is
non-linear, i.e. causes and effects merge instantaneously.
Environments, ecosystems or ecologies by the very nature of their
non-linear dynamics are emergent systems. "Environments are not
just containers, but are processes that change the content totally
(McLuhan, E. and Zingrone 1995, 273)." McLuhans picture of
communications is very fluid in which a medium played a dynamic
role in communications rather than being a passive vessel for
messages transmitted between agents and hence the interaction among
media, their content and the senders and receivers of information
is a non-linear and complex one. Basically, media ecology is a form
of complexity theory.In complexity theory new levels of order
emerge as phase transitions from one form of organization to
another. Another element of McLuhans thought that parallels
complexity theory is his idea that a new medium gives rise to new
patterns of communication, work, social organization and cognition.
I would suggest that these new patterns are emergent and represent
phase transitions. According to emergence theory as aggregates gain
a level of complexity novel properties emerge; these properties
cannot be reduced to or predicted from the lower level from which
they emerged (el-Hani and Pereira 2000, 133). With the introduction
of a new medium into an existing media environment new properties
of the media environment emerge.
McLuhan showed that with the arrival of a new medium society,
work, and learning all go through a major change in which novel
properties emerge; these properties cannot be reduced to or
predicted from the lower level from which they emerged (ibid.).
These novel properties that emerge represent in terms of complexity
theory a phase transition that parallels the phase transition from
ice to water or water to steam in thermodynamics. One cannot
predict the properties of water from ice. In the same way one
cannot predict the properties and impacts of written expression
from spoken language or theproperties and impacts of the printing
press from hand written manuscripts. Every new medium gives rise to
a phase transition in which new forms of expression emerge
withproperties and impacts that cannot be predicted from the media
environment that preceded the arrival of the new medium as McLuhan
documented.
An example of a phase transition is the one that took place with
the emergence of speech and Homo sapiens from pre-verbal hominids
resulting in a richer culture and the uniquely human ability to
plan. McLuhan described this development in the following terms:
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate
experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology
by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to
grasp it in a new way.
The next phase transition that McLuhan described was the one
that occurred with the introduction of writing and the transition
from audile-tactile space of oral culture characterized by the way
in which information is processed simultaneously in real time to
the visual space of literate culture in which the forms of space
and time are uniform, continuous and connected and information is
processed one thing at a time.
Other phase transitions that McLuhan identified were the
introduction of
a. the alphabet, which led to the emergence of abstract science,
deductive logic, monotheism, history and philosophy (McLuhan and
Logan 1977);
b. the printing press, which led to the emergence of
individualism, vernacular literature, nationalism, the Renaissance,
the Reformation, mass production and industrialization (McLuhan
1962);
c. electric media such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and
television, which led to the return to or re-emergence of the
audile-tactile patterns of oral culture (McLuhan 1964). In each
case one could not have predicted the outcome and effects of these
media or the developments that followed in their wake, as is the
case with any form of strong emergence.
I would suggest that we can add to this list one more phase
transition in communications that McLuhan did not live to see,
namely the arrival of digital media which possess many of the
properties of electric media that McLuhan identified but also new
properties that one could not have foreseen. In addition to the
characteristics that digital media possess by virtue of also being
electric media they also possess the properties of mobility,
ubiquity, convergence, aggregation of content, social collectivity
and remix (Logan 2010). McLuhan actually hinted at some of these
developments but digital media represent emergent phenomena as they
gave rise to totally new developments and properties of
communication that never existed with electric mass media
(ibid.).
McLuhan pointed out that the introduction of a new medium
resulted in the re-organization of the media environment with the
emergence of new phenomena that could not have been imagined in the
older regime. This corresponds to one of the central themes of
complexity theory, namely that one cannot predict the behaviour of
the new composite entity (i.e. the new media environment that
emerges with the new medium) based on ones knowledge of the
components of that composite medium. One could not have predicted
the emergence of the Web based on ones knowledge of the Internet
nor all of the Webs assets such as Wikipedia, iTunes, social media
and blogs that emerged one after another based on ones knowledge of
the Web. In fact many of the successful blockbuster Web
applications were not planned in the way they finally emerged.
Flickr was not designed to be a photo application but rather as a
social medium but because the founders of Flickr built an excellent
photo sharing capacity into their original design the use of the
site evolved into todays form. The properties of Flickr emerged as
the Web site we know today as a result of the process of
self-organization of the original site and its users. Wikipedia
started out by soliciting articles from experts, but because they
allowed input and editing privileges from its users, it
self-organized into its present form where articles are crowd
sourced from its users.
One of the interesting points that McLuhan made is that not only
is it not possible to predict the new properties and new patterns
that emerge with the introduction of a new medium it is also the
case that most people cannot even detect the changes that the new
medium has introduced. Most people with the exception of artists
are completely oblivious to the changes and continue to operate as
they did before the introduction of that new medium or use the new
medium in more or less the same way they used the older media. Any
medium tends to create a completely new environment [that] gets
very little recognition as a form except from the artist (McLuhan,
McLuhan, Staines 2003, 67).
The Medium is the Message, the Butterfly Effect and Brian
Arthurs Increasing Returns
I would like to suggest that McLuhans famous one-liner the
medium is the message is equivalent to the butterfly effect of
chaos theory and Brian Arthurs notion of increasing return. What
all three of these phenomena have in common is that a small change
in the environment coupled with a positive feedback loop can lead
to an enormous structural change. Edward Lorenz discovered while
using his non-linear model of the weather that a very small change
in the initial conditions could create enormous differences in the
outcome of the predictions that the model made. Known in chaos
theory as the butterfly effect it suggested that a butterfly
flapping its wings in Asia could cause a tornado in Kansas. Brian
Arthur challenging the notion that an economic system could achieve
equilibrium by balancing supply and demand showed that the positive
feedback from the marketplace, i.e. increasing concerns, could
reinforce certain trends and give rise to anomalies such as the
concentration of certain industries in certain locales such as the
phenomena of Silicon Valley or the concentration of biotech
companies in San Diego.
McLuhans idea that the medium is the message suggests that major
impact of a medium is not the content that its transmits but rather
the environment that it creates, which leads to effects much
greater that the messages that form its content. Like the butterfly
that flaps its wings in Asia giving rise to a tornado in Kansas,
Gutenberg generating copies of the Bible using his primitive
movable type printing press created a cascade of events and
subsequently a storm of change in Europe of a momentous proportion
ranging from the science revolution, the Renaissance and the
Reformation to nationalism, mass education, mass production and the
Industrial revolution. McLuhan showed that the Gutenberg Galaxy
that he described in his book of the same name was basically a
self-organizing system.
A new medium creates a form of positive feedback paralleling
Arthurs model of economics and increasing returns. The pattern of
organization of a medium that one makes use of becomes a model of
how one organizes ones thoughts, ones information and even ones
social and economic activities. If the information one receives is
in that format then one formulates ones ideas in the terms of that
format and when one creates ones output one naturally makes use of
that format. It is simply a case of increasing returns as
formulated by Brian Arthur. Another parallel to increasing returns
is the way a child will speak their language in the same dialect
that they hear at home despite being introduced to the standard
version of their national language in school.
The human media ecosystem or mediasphere that was the object of
McLuhans studies is a self-organizing system. For McLuhan media
include all the tools, technologies and communication systems by
which human interact with each other and hence mediate their
physical, biological, cultural, social and economic environments.
The mediasphere of all human tools, technologies and communication
systems is unplanned it self-organizes itself and evolves like the
biosphere through the interactions of individual inventors and
users with their media. The mediasphere evolves in the same
Darwinian pattern of descent, modification and selection, as is the
case with the evolution of living organisms since every medium,
technology or tool is a combination of some combination of prior
media, tools and technologies. Like the biosphere the mediasphere
has no endpoint it constantly probes the adjacent possible as
described by Stuart Kauffman (2000) and like the biosphere its
complexity continues to increase.
Just as older forms in the biosphere survive as more complex
organisms evolve so too do earlier and simpler forms of
communication survive the emergence of more complex forms of
communication examples include the spoken word, gestures, hand
signals, pencil and paper. Some media do become extinct like the
typewriter and the quill pen but re-emerge the way the dinosaur
went extinct but evolved into birds. The QWERTY keyboard from the
typewriter, for example, survived as the input for computers.
In order to contrast his approach to economics that incorporates
complexity and increasing returns with the older neo-classical
approach to economics Brian Arthur created the table below that
compares his approach with the neo-classical one (Arthurs original
table can be found in Waldrop 1992, 37). To illustrate the parallel
between McLuhans media ecology approach and Brian Arthurs complex
adaptive systems approach to economics we have added to Brian
Arthurs table a comparison of McLuhans media ecology approach to
media studies with that of the older content analysis approach to
media studies. We have done this by adding to Brian Arthurs table a
parallel comparison of McLuhans media ecology approach and the
older content analysis approach. To read the table below remember
that the text above the solid lines relates to the comparison to
the old and new (Arthur) economic theories and the text below the
solid lines relates to the old and new (McLuhan) media
theories.
Old Economics (Neo-classical)___ New Economics (Arthurs
approach)__________
Content Analysis
Media Ecology (McLuhans Approach)
Decreasing returns_________Increasing
returns________________________Medium independence
The medium is the message
Based on 19th cent. Physics
Based on biology (structure, pattern,
self organization, life cycle)________________
Based on 19th cent. literary theory
Based on ecology, pattern recognition, emergence
People identical
Focus on individual life; people
separate and different_______________________
Recipients of info identical
User is the content
If only there were no external-
Externalities and differences become
ities and all had equal abilities
the driving forces. No Nirvana.
we would reach Nirvana System constantly
unfolding__________________
Content unaffected by the mediumThe medium is the message. The
mediasphere is constantly unfolding
Elements are quantities and prices Elements are patterns and
possibilities__________ Elements are words and contentElements are
patterns and possibilities
No real dynamics in the sense The economy is on the edge of
time.
everything is at equilibrium
It rushes forward, structures constantly
___________________________coalescing, decaying,
changing________________
No dynamics and content
The mediasphere is on the edge of time.
independent of the medium
It rushes forward, structures constantly
coalescing, decaying, changing
Sees subjects as structurally simpleSees subjects as
structurally complex__________Sees content as structurally
simpleSees content as structurally complex and
and independent of the mediumdependent on the medium
Economics as soft physics
Economics as highly complex science__________Media studies as
content analysisMedia studies as a complex ecological study
McLuhans notion that a medium gives rise to a service
environment that serves its users needs parallels the notion of
niche construction in both the biosphere and the econosphere. As a
new technology or medium emerges and creates a new environment or
niche it will first be utilized to serve or deliver the content of
the medium it is superseding. After some time new forms of content
emerge that take advantage of the new features of the new medium as
users explore the adjacent possible of the new medium. Automobiles
at first were horseless carriages that did little more than what a
horse and carriage could do. With time as the service environment
of road and service stations emerged the automobile took on many
new functions giving rise to expressways, suburbs, drive-in
restaurants and banks, and shopping malls.
Complex adaptive systems stay on the edge of chaos, the boundary
between a stable static state of affairs and a highly fluid chaotic
state of affairs. Living organisms, which must be able to propagate
their organization (Kauffman, Logan et. al. 2007) live on this
boundary because if they are in the highly ordered region they are
too inflexible and cannot adapt or adjust to the inevitable change
in their environment and hence they perish. On the other hand they
cannot survive in the chaotic region because they would be
overwhelmed by the excessive change they would have to deal with
and would be unable to preserve their organization.
The adjacent possible sits exactly on the edge of chaos and
living organisms probe this membrane between the ordered and
chaotic regimes. The same is true in the mediasphere, the
technosphere and the econosphere. If a culture or an economy does
not remain at the boundary between order and chaos then it will
eventually collapse or be taken over by a stronger cultural or
economic regime. If it wanders into the chaotic regime it will soon
collapse internally. If on the other hand it remains in the ordered
regime too long it eventually will be overtaken by another culture
or economy because it will not be able to meet the challenge of
coping with that rival culture or economy.
Content analysis communication theorists operate in the ordered
regime where they assume that the content is unaffected by the
change of media. Media ecology operates at the edge of chaos where
it is able to navigate the rapidly changing environment created by
the emergence of electrically configured information and more
recently with digitally configured information.
Evolution ala Darwins simple formula of descent, modification
and selection occurs through the exploration of the adjacent
possible in the biosphere, econosphere and the mediasphere. In all
three spheres the level of complexity increases. In the biosphere
there has been a steady increase of complexity from prokaryotes to
eukaryotes from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom; from
non-vertebrates to vertebrates; from fish to amphibians; to
reptiles; to birds; to mammals; to primates; to hominids; to Homo
sapiens. In the econosphere complexity increased from hunting and
gathering; to agriculture and pastoralism; to industrialization, to
the electric information era, to the digital knowledge age.
Communication systems in the mediasphere also increased in
complexity as they moved from non-verbal mimetic communication; to
orality; to manuscript literacy; to alphabetic literacy; to print
literacy; to electric media; to digital media. Note that while the
complexity of each sphere complexifies and diversifies earlier and
simpler forms still survive. They are obsolesced in the sense that
they no longer dominate but they do not disappear.
Media, Formal Cause and Emergence
I have argued that McLuhans approach to media ecology
foreshadowed emergence and complexity theory. McLuhan never used
that terminology but instead characterized his approach as making
use of formal cause as derived from Aristotle. The idea of formal
cause was a key part of McLuhan approach to studying media. He
wrote in a letter to the editor of the journal Commonweal
concerning their review of Elizabeth Eisenstein study, The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes no personal
value judgments because it is concerned with formal causality and
the study of effects (McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan 2011[and
hereafter referred to as MFC], 92).
In this section I will argue that the concept of formal cause
that McLuhan makes use of is closer to the ideas of emergence and
complexity theory than they are to Aristotles notion of formal
cause as described in Book V of Metaphysics along with the other
three causes (material, efficient and final). I will also
demonstrate that Aristotles four causes cannot account for
emergence and complexity theory. There are some who claim that
Aristotle foreshadowed emergence. I will show that if this is the
case it is at best a form of weak emergence and only the notion
that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, perhaps the
weakest form of emergence of all.
To his credit Eric McLuhan has assembled a magnificent
collections of essays, three written by his father, Marshall
McLuhan, and one by himself in an award-winning book entitled Media
and Formal Cause (MFC). Lance Strate in his Foreword to the book
writes, Eric McLuhan presents us with a decidedly non-Aristotelian
Aristotle, an Aristotle that is consistent with general semantics
(MFC, x). In his own introduction to the book Eric writes, While
not formally about formal cause, this essay is effectively an
anatomy of it and anticipates the discussions that follow (MFC, 3).
I agree with the sentiments expressed by Lance and Eric and intend
to show that the formal cause that the Marshall and Eric McLuhan
make use of is truly non-Aristotelian and is in fact closely linked
to emergence and complexity theory.
I am by no means challenging the usefulness, validity or the
appropriateness of the way McLuhan makes use of what he calls
formal cause, rather I wish to enrich the conversation about formal
cause that Eric and Marshall McLuhan have treated us to in MFC by
suggesting that the use of formal cause and the meaning it acquires
in the four essays and introduction of the book, MFC, are closer to
the concept of emergence than to Aristotles original definition of
formal cause.
The description of the four causes upon which we will base our
discussion come directly from Book V of Aristotles Metaphysics and,
as we will see, the notion of formal cause that it encompasses is
quite different than what McLuhan identifies as formal cause.
Aristotle described his notion of cause as follows:
"Cause" means: (a) in one sense, that as the result of whose
presence something comes into beinge.g. the bronze of a statue and
the silver of a cup, and the classes which contain these [i.e.,
thematerial cause]; (b) in another sense, the form or pattern; that
is, the essential formula and the classes which contain ite.g. the
ratio 2:1 and number in general is the cause of the octaveand the
parts of the formula [i.e., theformal cause]. (c) The source of the
first beginning of change or rest; e.g. the man who plans is a
cause, and the father is the cause of the child, and in general
that which produces is the cause of that which is produced, and
that which changes of that which is changed [i.e., theefficient
cause]. (d) The same as "end"; i.e. the final cause; e.g., as the
"end" of walking is health. For why does a man walk? "To be
healthy," we say, and by saying this we consider that we have
supplied the cause [thefinal cause]. (e) All those means towards
the end which arise at the instigation of something else, as, e.g.
fat-reducing, purging, drugs and instruments are causes of health;
for they all have the end as their object, although they differ
from each other as being some instruments, others actions [i.e.,
necessary conditions] (Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18,
translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press 1989).
For myself I find it puzzling why one would want to consider
Aristotles notion of formal cause at all when discussing the
reversal of cause and effect and the figure ground interaction that
characterizes McLuhans approach to media ecology and his analysis
of the effects of media. In fact I wonder why Aristotle is
considered at all when discussing causality in our times. I do not
mean to be disrespectful. Aristotle was a fine philosopher, a great
drama critic, ethicist and rhetorician, not a bad biologist, but
his physics was not very good so why bring in his model of
causality especially when discussing the effects of media or
emergence. I find this to be puzzling. Let me describe some of
Aristotles very serious errors in physics. For example, he wrote
that if a ball was dropped from the mast of a moving ship the ball
would fall behind the mast, i.e. in the direction opposite to the
direction in which the ship was moving. If he had actually done the
experiment or had someone else climb to the top of the ships mast
and drop a ball he would have discovered his error. He did not. He
also claimed that for an object to be in motion it required a
constant force acting on it. Once again he is tripped up because of
a lack of understanding inertia, a concept he might have discovered
if he actually observed a ball being dropped from the mast of a
moving ship. So why should we trust him to talk about causality
when he was less an empiricist and more a rationalist.
In my opinion he and Plato retarded progress in the empirical
sciences like physics for 2000 years with their focus on
rationalism and their demeaning of empiricism. Aristotle and the
mathematicians of his day could not conceive of the concept of zero
or a vacuum because they accepted Parmenides argument that
non-being could not be, an argument Parmenides made to suggest that
nothing changes. Parmenides argued that if A changes into a B, then
A would not-be, but since non-being cannot be, A cannot change and
therefore nothing changes. This attitude translated into Aristotles
claim that nature abhors a vacuum.
In addition to these errors of Aristotle a great deal has
happened in our understanding of causality since his time that
makes his work on causality obsolete including the following:
The dethroning of Aristotelian physics with the work of Buridan
and the introduction of the idea of impetus, a forerunner of
inertia, to replace Aristotles notion that motion required a
constant force.
The rise of the new physics with Newton and his laws of motion
in which one can argue that nature becomes the efficient cause, the
laws of nature the formal cause and the elements of nature the
material cause. For Newton and other theists the final cause or the
purpose of nature was the glory of God. For deists and atheists
there is no final cause or purpose and nature is just the way it
is. This position is similar to that of todays emergentists, some
of whom may be likened to modern day deists. This is how I would
characterize my friend, Stuart Kaufman (2010) and the position he
articulates in his book, Reinventing the Sacred.
The emergence of the field concept to describe electromagnetic
interactions and their associated equations that are non-linear.
The field concept is a key notion for McLuhans understanding of the
effects of media.
Einsteins formulation of theories of relativity that revealed
absolute space and time do not exist and objects create their own
space, an idea that McLuhan borrowed directly from Einstein when he
asserted that technologies create their own environments.
The formulation of quantum mechanics where causality at the
atomic and subatomic level disappears and hence there are no causes
formal or otherwise. McLuhan made good use of quantum mechanic to
develop his notion of the resonant interval in acoustic space.
The rise of emergence and complexity theory in which the causal
relations are non-linear and not the product of an agent. Although
emergence and complexity theory are largely post-McLuhan
development there were earlier formulations of emergence before and
during his lifetime.In light of this we need to question how
relevant Aristotles four causes are to todays understanding of
science and the social sciences based on emergence and complexity
theory. Aristotle's four forms of cause is a left-brain
classification scheme without a sense of dynamics.I believe that
the way in which McLuhan made use of the notion of formal cause is
closer to the notion of emergence than Aristotles formulation of it
as the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the
classes which contain it {cause}. To support my assertion consider
some of the ways in which McLuhan describes formal cause in his
three essays in MFC:
formal causality is always the audience (MFC, 10).
the formal cause, or the public itself, is in perceptual flux
(MFC, 75).
formal causality reveals itself by its effects (MFC, 77).He also
wrote, that art must always start with the effect. This is another
way of saying that art must start with formal cause, and a with
concern with the audience (MFC, 79).
McLuhan also states that, causes and effects merge
simultaneously (MFC, 46) and Now effects merge with causes
instantly through speedup (MFC, 28). He also asserted that, When
the time is ripe in any process, the effects as ground have
preceded the cause as figures (MFC, 43).
Marshall McLuhan wrote to Ashley Montague, I feel compelled to
consider causation as following effects. The effects of the
telegraph created an environment of information that made the
telephone a perfectly natural development (MFC, 4). A new
technology creates an environment in which other things come into
being. This is a form of emergence a technology creates a niche in
which other things develop.
McLuhans reversal of figure and ground is closely related to his
reversal of cause and effect. I begin with ground and they begin
with figure. I begin with effects and work round to the causes.
Just as cause and effect are closely linked, so too are a figure
and the ground or the environment in which the figure operates. The
interaction between the two is non-linear and although it is causal
the final outcome of the interaction of the figure and the ground
is unpredictable and in fact never ceases to change or evolve, i.e.
there is never a state of equilibrium between a figure and its
ground or environment. The figure is transformed by the very ground
that it causes to come into being and the dynamic interplay between
the figure and its ground is never resolved. The novel properties
that arise through this ongoing interaction are emergent in the
sense one is unable to predict them ahead of time. The
figure/ground relationships that exist between performers who play
the role of figure and their audiences who are the ground for their
performance are also emergent. McLuhan (MFC, 10) was aware of this
when he wrote, My discovery that formal causality is always the
audience dawned on me while reading an essay by Arthur Miller on
the disappearance of his public: 1949: The Year It Came Apart (New
York Magazine, January, 1975).
McLuhan sums up his understanding of formal cause and the role
its plays in his exploration of the effects of media in a letter to
John Culkin dated June 19, 1975 (MFC, 130).
I realized that the audience is, in all matter of art and
expression, the formal cause, e.g., fallen man if the formal cause
of the Incarnation, and Platos public is the formal cause of his
philosophy. Formal cause is concerned with effects and with
structural form, and not with value judgments.
My own approach to the media has been entirely from formal
cause. Since formal causes are hidden and environmental, they exert
their structural pressure by interval and interface with whatever
is in their environmental territory. Formal causes are always
hidden whereas the things upon which they act visible.
Eric McLuhan also shares his fathers notion of formal cause:
Formal causality in which coming events cast their shadows before
them is hugely mysterious it deals with environmental processes,
which are not sequential and which therefore baffle any attempt to
come to grips with it (MFC, 7). Eric is basically describing
emergence, which is also hugely mysterious, non-sequential,
all-at-once and baffling. One source of bafflement is that one
cannot predict how an emerging system will finally self-organize.
Strong emergence also baffles many scientists who are physicalists
and believe that all phenomena including life, intelligence and
phenomena that many regard as spiritual can be reduced to
physics.
None of these implicit definitions of formal cause of Marshall
and Eric McLuhan that we have collected and which include the
audience, effects before causes and the simultaneity of causes and
effects fit with Aristotles definition with formal cause as a form
or pattern, but they do suggest emergence. A strong emergent system
is a complex system made up of many components that interact with
each other through a non-linear dynamics and self-organize into a
composite system that has novel properties that none of the
components of which it is made possess. Although the interactions
that create the emergent system are causal it is still not possible
to predict the behavior or properties of the system based on
knowledge of the components and their behaviour or to reduce the
behaviour or properties of the composite system to those of the
components of which it is composed. The emergent system affects the
components from which it emerged in what is called downward
causation. It is also difficult to separate effects and causes
because of the non-linearity of the dynamics as Marshall McLuhan
suggested when he talks of effects and causes merging and even of
effects preceding causes. McLuhans association of formal causality
with figure/ground also suggests the non-linearity of the
interactions of the components of an emergent system.
In suggesting the relationship or similarity of formal cause and
emergence I am accepting all of the conclusions reached by Eric and
Marshall McLuhan but I believe that the emergence connection that I
am suggesting provides another dimension to the concept of formal
cause that the both Eric and Marshall McLuhan make use of.
Part of my motivation for this synthesis is that I perceive
McLuhans reversal of cause and effect and, better yet, his
identification of their simultaneity as not strictly Aristotles
formal cause but rather the dynamics of an emergent system. I
believe the difference between emergence and McLuhans formal cause
approach is largely semantic. McLuhan was on to emergence but he
did not have the vocabulary for it when he first developed his
ideas in the 50s and 60s. McLuhans reversal of cause and effect
does not fit naturally into Aristotles notion of formal cause and
it most certainly foreshadows emergence.
Associating the reversal of cause and effect or their
simultaneity with formal causality implies that Aristotles views on
causality are still valid and it is necessary to fit Marshall
McLuhans brilliant observation of the reversal and/or simultaneity
of cause and effect into an Aristotelian framework. In fact
Aristotle comes up short on causality when one considers his errors
in physics due to putting rationalism ahead of empiricism as we
have referenced above.
After dismissing material, efficient and final cause to explain
McLuhans assertion that causation follows effects, Eric McLuhan
writes, That left formal cause, which had for many centuries been
the subject of debate. No-one was really certain as to what exactly
it was a condition that still obtains (MFC, 5). Well, I feel rather
certain that the formal cause as employed by McLuhan is nothing
other than emergence by another name.
Emergence entails the simultaneity of cause and effect. An
emergent system is not created by an agent and hence no efficient
cause in the Aristotelian sense as the components of the emergent
system self-organize rather than being organized by an agent
according to some plan, or form (and hence no formal cause in the
Aristotelian sense). Perhaps we can call the process of
self-organization as emergent cause as the form of the final system
emerges from the non-linear interactions and self-organization of
its components. There is no final cause in the Aristotelian sense
as there is no agent with a purpose. The purpose of the system is
the system itself. The purpose of life, an emergent phenomenon par
excellent, is the propagation of life or the propagation of its own
organization (Kauffman, Logan et al. 2007). We therefore see that
with a self-organizing emergent system that efficient cause, formal
cause and final cause collapse as the system creates itself (i.e.
it is its own efficient cause) according to its own pattern of
self-organization, (i.e. its formal cause) and its only purpose
(i.e. its final cause) is to propagate its own organization. Only
Aristotles material cause survives. As we see from this argument
the connection between Aristotles formal cause and emergence is not
very strong whereas the connection between McLuhans reversal of
and/or simultaneity of cause and effect and emergence or emergent
cause is quite strong.
I have made these observations and proposed these connections to
better understand what Marshall McLuhan called formal cause, which
I believe is better described and understood as emergent cause. It
also connects his work more closely with the ideas of Norbert
Weiner and Ludwig Bertalannfy who influenced him and Stuart
Kauffman, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Brian Arthur, John
Holland and the Santa Fe School.
Is Formal Cause Strictly Restricted to Human Affairs
The purpose of a human culture, defined as patterns for human
behavior Geertz (1973, p. 8), is, as is the case with life, the
propagation of its organization. Even though the culture
encompasses many different individuals there is still no overall
agent controlling a culture. A culture like a living organism is an
example of a self-organizing emergent system.
Eric McLuhan claims, Our tetrad of laws bring Aristotle up to
date; at the same time, it provides an analytic of formal cause,
the first ever proposed. Because the tetrad applies exclusively to
human utterance and artifacts, it follows that formal cause is
uniquely and particularly human. That is, and I believe this to be
crucial, absent human agency or intellect there is no formal cause
at all (MFC, 123).
Eric McLuhan is suggesting that formal cause is restricted to
human activities, a restriction not possessed by emergent systems
or by Aristotles use of formal cause in his biological theory. This
at first glance this seems to challenge the identification of
McLuhans notion of formal cause with strong emergence. If we can
extend McLuhans formal cause to non-human circumstances we can
retain the isomorphism between emergence and formal causality. Let
us for a moment consider biological evolution and the notion that
effects can precede causes. McLuhan argued that the effect of the
telegraph was the cause of the telephone. In Darwinian terms we can
reformulate this observation by suggestion that the telegraph was a
Darwinian preadaptation of the telephone. Other examples abound the
printing press, as McLuhan pointed out in non-Darwinian terms, was
a preadaptation or formal cause of mass production and the assembly
line. The computer and the telephone were a preadaptation of the
Internet and the Internet a preadaptation of the Web and the Web a
preadaptation of Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mention a
few. The analogy with biology is very strong. The cooling devices
used by insects were the Darwinian preadaptation for flight and the
swim bladder in fish that allowed them to adjust the depth to which
they could swim were the Darwinian preadaptation of lungs that
allowed animals to inhabit the dry land. Here we have in biological
evolution effects preceding causes.
Each of the examples from biology are examples of strong
emergence and at the same time satisfy McLuhan brand of formal
causality in which effects precede causes. And each of the examples
from the evolution of technology satisfies Darwins definition of a
pre-adaptation. We can extend the analogy even further. A Darwinian
preadaptation cannot be prestated (Kauffman, Logan et al. 2007).
This is also characteristic of strong emergence where the
properties of the emergent system cannot be reduced to, derived
from or predicted from the components from which it emerged. The
same holds for the evolution of technology. One could not have
predicted that the printing press would lead to the assembly line
and mass production nor could one at the time of Gutenberg
predicted the developments that followed in the wake of his
invention such as individualism, vernacular literature,
nationalism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation (McLuhan 1962).
And as already stated no one predicted the emergence of various
Internet applications such as the Web itself, Google, Flickr,
Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, NetFlix, Twitter and scores of other Web
apps. To conclude I believe that strong emergence is equivalent to
the formal cause defined by McLuhan as opposed to the formal cause
defined by Aristotle.
Given that media are extensions of their users, it follows that
the interactions of the media and their users are non-linear and
the co-evolution of the users and their tools are emergent. This
idea is sometimes expressed as we shape our tools and our tools
shape us (not formulated by McLuhan but used by him and often
attributed to him). It is our tools and technology, which makes us
human. What distinguishes the genus homo and humans from the
non-human apes is the sophistication of our tools and technology.
Digital technology does not make us post-human any more than did
electricity, mechanical devices, the Mousterian hand axe and the
older and more primitive Acheulean hand axe. In fact it was the
invention and use of the hand axe that made us human and
distinguished us from our ape ancestors.
Strong emergence is the way life came into being and the way
weather patterns form and so has been part of the history of our
planet from its inception and long before there were humans to
identify it. It was not until the electric/digital era that humans
became aware of the role strong emergence has played and is playing
in the history of the planet and life on the planet. It was only
with digitally-configured information, particularly the personal
computer that allowed us to become aware of strong emergence,
complexity theory and chaos vis--vis the butterfly effect. Strong
emergence at first baffled many scientists who found it a hard
concept to take on board and there are still holdouts. This
parallels the resistance to Marshall McLuhans reversal of cause and
effect and figure and ground for the same reasons. The advent of
the Internet has loosened up some of the resistance to Marshall
McLuhan due to the way in which he foreshadowed and predicted so
much of our digital world, but as with emergence there are still
holdouts.
Conclusion
Eric McLuhan mentions his fathers interest in the varieties of
causality (MFC, 8). Emergence is one such variety of causality. It
supersedes Newtonian causality, which has very limited application
such as the movement of the planets about the sun in our solar
system or the actions of a simple pendulum. Newtonian causality is
about connections, which McLuhan dismisses as irrelevant for the
electric age: A connection is not a cause but a hang-up the absence
of an interest in causation cannot persist in the new age of
ecology. Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns (MFC, 8).
Ecological systems are non-linear emergent systems that are best
described by patterns rather than the detailed behaviour of each of
the components of the ecosystem. McLuhan was describing emergence
and not formal causality. Referring to his fathers ecological
approach as described in the above quote Eric writes: Perhaps its
signal contribution to our theme was the discovery that formal
cause coincided with groundsituation or environment (MFC, 9). The
identification of formal cause with groundsituation or environment
is tantamount of identifying it with emergence supporting my notion
that formal cause as defined and used by both Marshall and Eric
McLuhan is emergence by another name. This reinforces my contention
that formal cause and emergence are the flip sides of the same
coin. Would formal cause by any other name such as emergence be as
effective in describing the reversal of cause and effect or their
simultaneity? I think so!
Acknowledgement: I wish to acknowledge that the latter part of
this chapter from the section Media, Formal Cause and Emergence
onwards was stimulated by the thread Formal Cause Murdered Again on
the Media Ecology Association listserv, particularly the post by
Eric Jenkins and of course the collection of essays Media and
Formal Cause edited by Eric McLuhan